Vaping may be causing irreversible harm to children’s health, doctors say

Doctors have raised the alarm about high levels of vaping among children worldwide, saying they are convinced e-cigarettes are causing irreversible harm to their health.Cardiologists, researchers and health experts said they were “extremely concerned” about the harmful effects of e-cigarettes on millions of teenagers and young people, including exposure to toxins and carcinogens – some of which are still unknown.Nicotine levels in e-cigarettes can be very high, raising the risk of addiction and injury to the developing brains of adolescents. Children are also risking long-term cardiovascular effects as a result of vaping at school and college, experts say.Speaking at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) annual congress in Madrid, the world’s largest heart conference, Prof Maja-Lisa Løchen, a senior cardiologist at the University hospital of North Norway, said she was concerned that millions of children could face ill health in future

Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’

News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out.The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely.“Now that I don’t watch the news, I just don’t have that anxiety

Ministers urged to put brakes on offices in England being turned into homes

Dozens of organisations have signed an open letter calling on the government to scrap office-to-residential conversions in England, which analysis has found led to the loss of almost 28,000 affordable homes.Local government campaigners, housing providers and homelessness charities have all joined the call to abolish some permitted development rights (PDR), which grant automatic planning permission to building projects and are often used to convert office blocks into housing.A major point of contention is that PDR developments are not required to make affordable housing contributions. New analysis by the Local Government Association (LGA) has found that nearly 28,000 affordable homes have been lost due to office-to-residential conversions under PDR in the past 11 years.An amendment to the planning and infrastructure bill – the government’s flagship planning changes designed to speed up housebuilding – that would remove many PDR allowances is being debated in parliament on Monday

Swab test can identify children with potentially deadly heart condition, study finds

A simple cheek-swab test can identify children with a potentially deadly heart condition, five years before they would normally be diagnosed, research has found.Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM), which is typically genetic, is responsible for more than 10% of sudden cardiac deaths in children.The condition is caused by abnormalities in the proteins between heart cells, which lead to problems in the structure and electrical activity of the heart. ACM can often develop and strike without warning.But research shows abnormalities in the proteins can also be seen in the lining of the cheeks, which can reveal what is happening in the heart

English councils pay private landlords millions in incentives to house homeless families

Councils across England are increasingly spending millions of pounds a year in incentive payments to private landlords to persuade them to house homeless families, with campaigners describing it as a “senseless waste of public money”.Data gathered by the campaign group Generation Rent via freedom of information requests showed that 37 councils spent more than £31m on one-off cash payments to private landlords on 10,792 occasions in 2024-25.The data, from the 32 London councils and the 10 councils outside the capital with the biggest statutory homelessness issues, showed cash-strapped local authorities are increasingly using these payments to encourage landlords to house families who are homeless or facing eviction.In London, the amount being spent by councils on incentives to private landlords has increased by 54% since 2018, the last time data was collected.Ben Twomey, the chief executive at Generation Rent, said: “The soaring cost of renting and the government’s decision to freeze the local housing allowance has put councils across the country in a near impossible position

‘You’re the only port of call for 400 hospital patients, which is absurd’: Matthew Hutchinson on the perils of life as an NHS doctor

Are You Really the Doctor?, Matthew Hutchinson’s memoir of being a black doctor in the NHS, opens in A&E with a patient suffering from a thunderclap headache and taking time out from his excruciating pain to complain that Hutchinson is “very scruffy”. “I’m wearing scrubs, the pyjama-like, hospital-issue uniform – something pretty difficult to put your own personal flair on,” Hutchinson writes, concluding wearily that the guy must have been reacting to something else: “Skin, hair, or general … vibe.” You couldn’t call it a microaggression, the patient’s assumption that, being black, Hutchinson was unlikely to be an expert. But this anecdote barely registers on the Geiger counter of bigotry in healthcare that Hutchinson writes about trenchantly and acerbically, from the prejudices doctors face from patients and the gender and race blindspots in medical textbooks, to the racism that could endanger a patient’s life (black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth).Meeting Hutchinson in the Guardian’s offices in London, he emanates forethought and competence